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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29659680">ocean avenue</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/bydayornight/pseuds/bydayornight'>bydayornight</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>break up song [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Lost Decade (Roswell New Mexico), M/M, Mostly Canon Compliant, Pre-Canon, Teenagers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 06:13:33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>964</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29659680</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/bydayornight/pseuds/bydayornight</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>One of the first things Alex did when he returned to Roswell was linger for a bit on Ocean Avenue. It had always been funny, a street like that, right in the middle of Roswell.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“We’re like a thousand miles from the ocean,” Michael used to gripe when he saw the sign. He had never seen that great blue unknown, never tasted the salt in the air.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Alex had smiled to himself. He knew what it was like to wish for water in a desert, understood the urge to put something out into the universe and see if anything came back.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Sometimes it worked.</i>
</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>After 10 years, Alex is back in Roswell for good. All he can think about is the music and the boy he left behind. Maybe he can still fix it.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Michael Guerin/Alex Manes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>break up song [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2112414</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>29</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>ocean avenue</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>One of the first things Alex did when he returned to Roswell was linger for a bit on Ocean Avenue. It had always been funny, a street like that, right in the middle of Roswell.</p>
<p>“We’re like a thousand miles from the ocean,” Michael used to gripe when he saw the sign. He had never seen that great blue unknown, never tasted the salt in the air.</p>
<p>Alex had smiled to himself. He knew what it was like to wish for water in a desert, understood the urge to put something out into the universe and see if anything came back. </p>
<p>Sometimes it worked.</p>
<p>After Alex gave Michael his brother’s guitar, they started talking about making music together. Alex had been doing some writing, and for the first time, Michael wasn’t playing on borrowed time. Sometimes they’d sit in the weed-ridden park off Ocean Avenue with their guitars and riff off each other, driving into the desert when the neighbors shooed them away. Sometimes they even got through an entire song without one of them (Michael) inserting a silly rhyme about someone (Kyle) getting what was coming to him. Mostly, they kept to the time-honored tradition of singing—screaming, really—about sticking it to the Man. No, they didn’t know who the Man was or what they were sticking to him. That was kind of besides the point.</p>
<p>Long after his father had gone to bed, Alex scrawled bits and pieces of songs and half-formed ideas in his notebook by flashlight, under the covers, sometimes until four in the morning. Halfway across town, Michael drove his truck out by the abandoned turquoise mines, strumming chords until the swirl of what was going on inside of him melted into the stillness of the desert. Sometimes he stayed up, waiting for the sun to rise. Alex did too, staring out the window at the same stars.</p>
<p>It wasn’t long before they started staying up all night together, shoulder-to-shoulder, or tangled into each other. Two night owls under that endless desert sky.</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>The sun had already set when Alex told Michael he was enlisting. The look in his eyes broke Alex’s heart, and he felt selfish for thinking of his own heart in that moment. But it was always going to be two hearts, one stone.</p>
<p>“No,” Michael said. He couldn’t even muster the strength to feign indifference, to don a bit of armor. It came out as plainly as he felt it. A plea. “Don’t do this.”</p>
<p>“I have to.”</p>
<p>“You don’t have to do anything.”</p>
<p>They both knew it wasn’t true. If the world had taught them anything, it was how powerless they truly were in the face of—well, the Man.</p>
<p>“I’m leaving tomorrow.”</p>
<p>Alex had left it until the last possible second, thinking it’d be easier. Drop the bomb, walk away. But if this was the easy way out in theory, it wasn’t feeling that way in practice. He marveled at the fact that he had even managed to say the words out loud.</p>
<p>Michael did not take the explosive route, which Alex found unnerving. At least yelling would have been predictable. Silence, on the other hand, was a fuse, newly lit with an unknown endpoint.</p>
<p>“Maybe it won't come up again,” Michael finally said, looking out into the dusty blue darkness.</p>
<p>“What won't come up?”</p>
<p>“The sun.” He turned towards Alex with a weak smile. “Can’t leave if tomorrow never comes.”</p>
<p>It wasn’t so much a joke as it was an earnest desire to extend the night into forever, into however long he could make it last.</p>
<p>Alex accepted it for the splinter of an olive branch that it was. If they were standing in the eye of the storm, he’d take the interlude.</p>
<p>“We still have tonight,” he said, calm and conciliatory.</p>
<p>“Yeah. You can say goodbye tomorrow.”</p>
<p>Alex knew what he meant.</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>In ten years, he had only seen Michael for a handful of nights interspersed between long stretches of radio silence, all saturated with a profound unease at what they meant to each other, each subsequent goodbye on a wavering scale between resentful and world-ending.</p>
<p>But that was just in person. In truth, he saw Michael all the time in his dreams, carried his essence around with him in some deep, bottomless space in his overly sentimental heart. It sometimes felt like Michael was there, like Alex had never left. Sometimes.</p>
<p>When he thought about it now, he felt stupid. Stupid for ever feeling like there had only been one way out. How many different ways it could have played out if he’d had the vision. Or maybe it was the courage. He hadn’t known it then that he’d had the world at his feet, in more ways than one.</p>
<p>The temporary visits in the intervening years had morphed Roswell into a different place, one that wasn’t his hometown. It was just an ordinary place with some familiar features that shifted in and out of focus, where he could see a few friendly faces before being quickly whisked out. No harm, no foul.</p>
<p>But now he was back in Roswell for good, and he could already feel it changing him from the inside. Still seventeen, still scared, still his father’s son.</p>
<p>But time travel meant a do-over, right? He thought about what would happen if he found him now and they left this town in the rearview mirror, do the thing they should have done a decade ago. Despite the weight of all that had occurred between them, Michael would always be his ocean in the desert, and Alex could never resist the undertow. Inexplicably, he knew it was always supposed to be that way. Just the two of them, together.</p>
<p>Maybe they could still be kids, after all.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Based on Ocean Avenue by Yellowcard</p>
<p>This is the last thing I’m writing for RNM for the time being. Thank you for all the support, the comments, the kind words, the kudos. It’s been fun.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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